Note:
I wrote this in 2010 when the Church in Ireland where I was doing a lot of work
as a facilitator was having a very difficult time. I went back to it because of
some research I was doing and finding it still relevant thought to share it. Any reflections or comments are welcome.
Preface
These are personal reflections born
out of a desire to articulate for my own benefit what I am experiencing and
feeling about the state of the Church at this time. I now wish to share these with others in the
hope that they might be of some use to people who, like myself, care deeply
about the church and its future. I am
what I am—I decided long ago that despair was the easy way out and, as Václav
Havel writes, “There is only one thing I
will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.”
The Historic Church: A Human
Institution Entrusted with a Divine Mission
The Human
Institution
“An institution is a manifestation of
and inseparable from the social environment from which it emerged and on which
its health and existence depend.”
……..Dee Hock, Birth of the Chaordic Age.
When the Emperor Constantine declared
Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire he wed the Church to the
state. This enabled the Church to
replicate the structures of the state as the most effective way to maintain
control of a rapidly growing and expanding institution. Later, with the division of the Empire, the Church
followed suit (fortunately, a conveniently available theological difference was
a readymade excuse for this schism). In
the West the Bishop of Rome became the titular head of the Church and in the
East the Bishop of Constantinople became its head. And so there were two emperors, each with his
patriarch to rule his Church. Just as
sovereignty resided in the person of the emperor, the governance of the church was
understood to reside in the person of the pope/patriarch. And for both this was understood to be a
divinely sanctioned sovereignty. Thus it
was that the intentional effort to bolster the authority of the Church as an institution
by investing that institution with divinely sanctioned authority was
initiated. Over the centuries this has
been an extraordinarily successful effort.
In the 19th century, following the lose of the Vatican State,
the Church found it necessary to further institutionalize its divinely
sanctioned sovereignty by declaring it possible for the Pope to make pronouncements
that are infallible. While the Divine
Right of Kings to rule may have been consigned to history in the 18th
Century, that same right is still alive and well in the historic Church.
Today, to question the institution of
the Church is taken as questioning a divinely sanctioned reality. The institution in its form, character and
operation is seen as not of this world and thus not responsible to or
accountable to secular society. In the
summer of 2010, when the Belgian Police raided Church properties and removed
documents and computers searching for information concerning the abuse of
children and youth, the Pope called such a raid “deplorable”. Given the recent history of child abuse cases
in Belgium
However, this should not surprise us
since the Church as an institution evolved in the days of the Roman Empire and
it still reflects the wisdom and understanding of governance and operational
methods of an institution that were current at that time. Over the centuries the Church has defended
its core institutional values and maintained them in the face of considerable
pressure to change. Its operational
practices, policies and procedures are essentially unchanged from those in
place when Rome Roman
Empire . Thus we see
manifested in the Church today the truth of the first part of Dee Hock’s quote at
the beginning of this paper. “An
institution is a manifestation of and inseparable from the social environment
from which it emerged...”
By implication it is clear that the
historic Church is the product of human and not divine creation. And as a human institution the last part of
Dee Hock’s statement is a vital clue to understanding the predicament of the Church
in today’s world. He said, “…and on which its health and existence
depend.” The historic Church is an
institution which finds that the world in which it emerged is dead and
gone. The world view of the Roman Empire is long gone and with it the social
environment out of which the historic Church emerged and in which it was
designed to function as an effective and powerful institution. In the natural world when the environment
changes plants and animals in that environment must adapt or die and so it is
in societies. When the social
environment in which an institution has emerged changes and is no longer
nurturing and sustaining that institution then it must adapt or it will surely
sink into irrelevancy, obsolescence, and eventually disappear. This is the nature of history and the passage
of time. Human community does not stand
still and institutions that fail to evolve with the changing human community
will become less and less relevant.
The simple fact is that the world in
which the historic Church was designed to operate and perform is long gone. Today the Church is an institution operating
out of a siege mentality. It sees itself
under attack from all quarters and as a misunderstood and innocent victim of
poorly informed and vindictive people wishing it only ill. It finds its statements and press releases
being treated with skepticism and doubt.
Its leadership is seen as untrustworthy and out of touch. Its insistence on its special place and role
in society as a divinely inspired and sanctioned institution has been
challenged and questioned as never before.
Even the pillars sustaining this institution (like celibacy) are being
questioned and challenged both from within and without the institution. It finds ordinary people turning away from it
as a source of inspiration and guidance for living a meaningful and purposeful
life. And thus, its failure as an
institution in the human community has dealt profound blows to its ability to
fulfill its true mission and purpose in society. However, all of these things should not be
seen as any more than symptoms of much deeper contradictions in the life of the
historic Church. The future of the
historic Church as a vibrant, creative, responsive institution in the human
community will not be secured by focusing on symptoms, as grave and disturbing
as these may be.
The
historic Church can only be transformed when it comes to grips with the
contradictions of:
·
Its debilitating institutional self-understanding; and
·
Its related failure to acknowledge the reality of the changed
social environment in which it must live and work today.
But
even more fundamentally, the historic Church must be willing to accept that it
is itself a human institution governed by humans. In so doing it can then begin to answer the
question:
·
What are the essential institutional characteristics
necessary for the Church to fulfill its mission in and for today’s human
community?
The
first step in this process of transformation is to understand the world we are
living in.
The
Post-Modern World
There are a number of shifts in the
social environment that have occurred and which present fundamental challenges
to the historic Church and its traditional mode of operating.
One of these fundamental shifts is in
the area of governance. The
authoritarian form of governance has prevailed since people began to organise
communities and institutions. However,
we live in an age where there is a shift to participatory systems as the
emerging dominant form of institutional governance. As Patricia McLagan and Christo Nel write in
the introduction to their book The Age of
Participation:
Authoritarian governance is not a
viable option for the future. Powerful
forces are propelling us toward the alternative. As information technology, global economic
and ecological interdependence, stakeholder demands, and other forces converge,
participation is really the only viable governance option.
They go on to point out that
continued autocracy has very high costs.
Certainly the failure of the historic Church to protect young people
entrusted to its care and then to effectively manage the crisis when this failure
emerged has caused a collapse in the creditability of the institution’s
leadership and an erosion of trust and confidence in the Church as an
institution. This has indeed been a very
high cost to pay to protect the authoritarian system of Church governance.
However it is not only in these
dramatic events faced by the Church that this challenge can be seen. In local communities, in the work place and
groups everywhere there is more and more participation and involvement in
planning and decision-making. Today
people expect to be involved in the decisions that are determining the future
of their communities, groups and organizations; they do not just expect it,
they are demanding it. It should not then
be a surprise that the same demand is made within the parish hall.
A second related shift is in the
source of a leader’s authority.
Historically a leader derived their authority from the position that
they occupied. Once a person assumed a
position they were invested by the institution with the authority that
accompanied that position. To question
that person’s authority was to question the institution itself. Thus to question the authority of a parish
priest was to question the whole structure of the historic Church which had
invested him with his authority as a parish priest. Of course the same was true for our political
leadership, our business leadership, etc.
Generally people were discouraged from questioning authority since it
would be seen as an attack upon the institution and thus upon society itself. However, this has changed. Today a leader’s authority does not flow from
their office or position held by them but from the perceived authenticity
of their leadership. The sub-title of
Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones’s book Why Should Anyone be Led by You? says it all—What it Takes to Be an Authentic Leader. In the Introduction they write:
It is to state the obvious that the
impact of leadership on our lives is profound—at work, in our spiritual lives,
in sport and of course, in politics. But
this observation does capture a peculiarly modern obsession, the search for authentic
leaders. In western societies, at least,
there is a deep and deepening disenchantment with the able role player or,
worse still, the skilled apparatchik—of the political or corporate kind. We are increasingly suspicious that we are
being “worked.” The search for
authenticity is ever more pressing.
All too often today our leaders are
perceived as self-serving, seeking only to maintain their power and
privileges. Rather than being the true
and faithful servants of the people they are called upon to serve, they are often
seen as only concerned with protecting their own position and serving the
interest of the institutional Church. Hypocrisy
and the absence of transparency in the life and work of historic Church leaders,
from the top to the bottom of the hierarchy, have destroyed people’s trust in
them and in the Church itself. Being
invested in a position of traditional authority no longer guarantees anyone
that they will be believed or trusted.
Today people wait and see what that person says and, more importantly,
does with their position. Today leaders
earn their acceptance as leaders by transparently including others and allowing
people to experience the authenticity of their leadership.
A third related shift has to do with
the structure of the historic Church as an institution. The structure of the institutional Church was
lifted and adapted directly from the Roman Empire . At the centre of the empire a supreme
sovereign appointed representatives who governed in his name the smaller geographic
dominions. Day to day business was conducted
at the diocesan level while decisions of significance had to be referred to the
central authority. This required a level
of uniformity and conformity across the whole dominion in order to ensure that the
writ of the central authority would be enforceable everywhere and always. Thus over the centuries a huge body of Canon
Law has been built up together with the bureaucracy to both enforce and
interpret that law. This command and control
hierarchical system with all authority flowing from a central point is proven
to be severely dysfunctional in today’s world.
In today’s world, with its vast amounts of information flowing at the
speed of light around the entire globe, it is no longer possible for one person
or even one group of people to command and control an institution the size of
the historic Church to the level that the central authority seeks to
maintain. Rather than being pro-active
and seizing the initiative, Church authorities will inevitably be reactive and
defensive, always responding to someone else’s agenda. Furthermore, because each and every
situation, no matter where or when it occurs quickly becomes available to the
entire globe, each and every “local” problem or crisis has the potential to become
a “global” crisis to which the central authority is expected to respond. In addition, the global accessibility of the internet
ensures that people have access to the information for themselves, unfiltered, enabling
them to decide for themselves the significance of events and the validity of an
interpretation any institution may seek
to impose upon the event. Thus it is
that precisely those strengths of a highly unified transnational institution
which enabled the historic Church to grow and be sustained through the
centuries, have become a source of weakness and dysfunction in today’s world.
A fourth fundamental shift that has
occurred is in the value of tradition. The
historic Church is steeped in tradition and it is tradition itself which is
often used to defend its practices and modes of operation. Even when some practice or teaching has been
enacted relatively recently, attempts are made to trace it back and link it to
the earliest days of the Church. At the
beginning of the 20th Century something like 80% of the world’s
population lived in rural areas. For the
most part people did what their forefathers did before them; they by and large
never moved far from the place of their birth and generally accepted the
traditions and norms of behavior associated with their particular community. Tradition ruled their lives and gave them
their identity. Everything about an
individual and their life was defined by those traditions. This dependence on tradition gave the
historic Church, as a repository of powerful life-significating traditions,
incredible influence and power in the life of both individuals and the
community.
At the end of the 20th
Century, over 80% of the world’s population lived in urban areas and more
importantly, all of us, no matter where we actually live, participate in an urban
mindset. One of the defining
characteristics of this urban mindset is that people’s way of defining
themselves is less connected to their past or to historic traditions or
relationships. People are not bound by
what their ancestors did or where they came from or what station they held in
life. It used to be that you got to know
someone by getting to know their past roots but today our roots are in the
future. We define ourselves not by where
we came from but by where we are going.
We experience in the urban world view a multitude of possibilities for
living our lives and we pick and chose for ourselves what we want to use in
creating our lives. Today we are a
people profoundly focused on what we are becoming and not on where we have come
from.
Saying, “this is the way it has
always been” no longer carries the weight as a justification for anything. This collapse in the value of tradition has
profoundly shaken the historic Church.
As an institution that defined itself through its historic traditions,
it has found itself to be a guardian of something that is no longer valued by
the people it endeavours to serve. The
institution’s traditional language no longer communicates and its traditional
symbols no longer receive the respect they once evoked. In a sense, in the urban world, people create
their own traditions and are unwilling to simply conform to the historic
traditions of the institutional Church.
The historic Church wrapped itself in its traditions and used them to
maintain its authority, but people today no longer accept these traditions
blindly and without question. The future
authority of the institutional Church cannot rely upon the power of its
traditions, but rather, in its endeavours to exercise authority towards a
population that is living future-orientated lives, must look to its
authenticity.
The fifth shift has to do with the
emergence of women as full and equal members of society. Across the world in the last fifty years women
have become prime ministers and presidents, chief executives of multi-national
corporations, they pilot 747s, they serve as judges and lawyers in court rooms
at all levels of the judicial system, they are presidents of large universities
and lead major United Nation’s Agencies and global Non-Governmental
Organisations. In western society, at
least, more and more women are the bread-winners in their families and are
becoming the majority sector of the population in employment. The traditional trajectory of a women’s
life—marriage, home making, child raising etc. is simply not the norm any
longer. Today it is much more likely to include
a university education, a career and then the possibility of a marriage and
maybe a family. But all of this is
merely an outward sign of a profound shift in the attitudes and values
regarding the role and place of women in the human community. Today neither men nor women accept that women
are second class in anything or in any role.
Women, as more than half of humanity, are taking their rightful place as
co creators of our future. Assigning
roles and responsibilities in society by gender is no longer reasonable or acceptable.
Centuries ago the historic Church established
the role and place of women in the institution.
This reflected the values of the human community at that time, but the Church,
seeking to ensure complete acceptance and obedience, proceeded to confer divine
sanction on this definition of a woman’s place.
This also guaranteed that the Church would be a male dominated
institution from top to bottom and that domination would not be questioned or
challenged for to do so would be to question something that was divinely
sanctioned. Thus the Church locked
itself into a position on the role and place of women which in the last century
has become less and less acceptable to both men and women across the
globe. Having once conferred divine
sanction on this position, the Church has had no choice except to defend its
position with ever more byzantine arguments and justifications. To change its position on the role and place
of women would require the Church to admit that it is not a divinely inspired
and sanctioned institution but rather a fallible human institution susceptible
to correction and change when a more human and spiritually fulfilling
possibility emerges for people. The
institutional Church’s failure to reform itself and open itself to the benefits
of using fully the gifts and talents of women of faith continues to impoverish
the Church and to make it increasingly difficult for such women, knowing that their
wisdom and skills will not be fully utilised, to commit to the Church.
These five fundamental shifts in the
social environment are, I believe, what the historic Church needs to recognize
and address in order to recreate itself, and to be able to move forward into its
future.
But we must also address
the question of what should that future be.
Every institution has a mission, it has its raison d’être; its reason to
be. This mission is not time bound but is
subject to interpretation as the institution responds to its shifting
environment. This is true also of the
historic Church and, in considering the Church’s divine raison d’être, I wish to
use an essay written by H. Richard Niebuhr in 1946 as a guide.
A Divine
Mission
In 1946 H. Richard Niebuhr, one of
the leading theologians of the mid‑twentieth century, contributed an essay
entitled The Responsibility of the Church
for Society as a chapter in a book entitled, The Gospel, The World and
The Church, edited by Kenneth Scott Latourette. In this essay, Niebuhr offers a succinct and
clear articulation of the nature of the Church’s responsibility and the role it
must play in human community in fulfilling that responsibility. Early in the essay he makes the point that
the “to whom” and the “for what” elements in responsibility
are closely connected. Concerning “for what” of the Church’s responsibility he says:
When men know that they stand before
an infinite judge and creator the content of their obligation becomes infinite:
they are required to exercise moral freedom in all areas of existence; no part
of conduct remains a matter of indifference or subject to pure necessity:
nowhere can man act without the liberty and obligation of moral agency.
Niebuhr goes on to say that if we are
to understand this unique sense of obligation we must define the Being to whom
the Church is obligated. He says, “…to define the Being to whom it is
answerable as God-in-Christ and Christ-in-God.
Indeed the Church itself must be described in these terms as the
community which responds to God-in-Christ and Christ-in-God.” In explaining these two terms he goes on
to say:
Before his judgment seat they expect
to be required to give account not for their treatment of the limited number of
friends and neighbors of the finite Jesus, but of all the sick, imprisoned,
hungry, thirsty men of the world—the neighbors, brothers and companions of an
omnipresent being. It is to
God-in-Christ, the universal, absolute and unconditioned in the particular that
the early Church renders account.
And
then:
The Church looks not only to the
absolute in the finite but to the redemptive principle in the absolute. God, it believes and confesses, is love; He
is mercy; He so loved the world that He gave His best-loved for its redemption;
it is His will that the wicked should not perish but turn from their ways and
live. To be a Christian Church is to be
a community which is always aware of and always responding to the redemptive
principle in the world, to Christ-in-God, to the Redeemer.
If the responsibility of the historical
Church is indeed a history-long and worldwide responsibility to care for all
innocent human suffering and the proclaiming of the Good News of Jesus the
Christ, our Lord, what then should we expect the institutional Church to be about. What does this mission look like in the day
to day acting out of this two-fold responsibility? Niebuhr identifies three functions which can
be used to define this mission. They
are: the apostolic, the pastoral and the pioneering functions of the Christian
community.
The Apostolic Function
The Church fulfills this function
when it announces the Gospel to all nations and calls them to be Disciples of
Christ and to individually and collectively repent. Niebuhr emphasizes that “…it does seem important and imperative that the Church should
discharge its apostolic responsibility by envisaging the needs of men in their
societies as well as in their isolation before God.” The focus in the apostolic function is not
only on the proclaiming of the good news of Jesus Christ but the need for that
proclamation to be combined with the call to repentance. Furthermore, it is necessary for this call to
repentance to be addressed to both individuals and to society. Niebuhr writes:
It is part of the apostle’s duty to continue
the prophetic function of preaching repentance.
The good news about the glory of divine goodness is neither rightly
proclaimed nor rightly heard if it is not combined with the bad news about the
great injustice which prevails in God’s world… How the Church is to carry out
this apostolic task in our time is one of the most difficult problems it
confronts. Its habits and customs, its
forms of speech and its methods of proclamation come from a time when
individuals rather than societies were in the centre of attention. Responsibility
to the living God requires in this case as in all others an awareness of the
immediate moment and its needs, a willingness to reconstruct one’s own habits
in order that the neighbor’s needs may be met, a readiness to depart from
tradition in order that the great tradition of service may be followed.
The Pastoral Function
Niebuhr writes; “The Church discharges its responsibility to God for society in
carrying out its pastoral as well as its apostolic functions. It responds to Christ-in-God by being a
shepherd of the sheep, a seeker of the lost, the friend of publicans and
sinners, of the poor and brokenhearted.” However, in our time the reality of caring for
individuals involves the Church in the task of caring for the larger societies
in which we all live.
The Church cannot be responsible to
God for men without becoming responsible for their societies. As the interdependence of men increases in
industrial and technological civilizations the responsibility for dealing with
the great networks of interrelationship increases. If the individual sheep is to be protected
the flock must be guarded.
The Church as Social Pioneer
The third and final dimension of the Church’s
mission is to be that part of the human community which leads and demonstrates
what is possible for both individuals and for society as a whole. Niebuhr
writes:
The Church is that part of the human
community which responds first to God-in-Christ and Christ-in-God. It is the
sensitive and responsive part in every society and mankind as a whole. It is that group which hears the Word of God,
which sees His judgments, which has the vision of the resurrection. In its relations with God it is the pioneer
part of society that responds to God on behalf of the whole society…In this
representational sense the Church is that part of human society and that
element in each particular society, which moves toward God, which as the priest
acting for all men worships Him, which believes and trusts in Him on behalf of
all, which is first to obey Him when it becomes aware of a new aspect of his
will…In ethics it is the first to repent for the sins of a society and it
repents on behalf of all. When it
becomes apparent that slavery is a transgression of the divine commandment,
then the Church repents of it, turns it back on it, abolishes it within itself,
it does this not as the holy community separate from the world but as the
pioneer and representative, it repents for the sin of the whole society and
leads in the social act of repentance.
Thus it is that the Church’s mission
is not just to proclaim the Good News of Christ-in-God, to call individuals and
societies to repent, to care for the innocent human suffering of this world but
to be a living demonstration and example of all of this in its life and action
as an institution.
This seems to be the highest form of
social responsibility in the Church. It
is the direct demonstration of love of God and neighbor rather that a
repetition of the commandment to self and others. It is the radical demonstration of
faith. Where this responsibility is
being exercised there in no longer any question about the reality of the Church. In
pioneering and representative action of response to God in Christ the invisible
Church becomes visible and the deed of Christ is reduplicated.
The Divine Mission of the institutional
Church is to:
·
Proclaim the Good News of Christ-in-God and lead in the act
of repentance
·
Lead in caring for all of God’s Creation and in particular
the innocent human suffering of our world
·
Be a living demonstration of the love of God and neighbor and
of the life of faith
When this happens then the
Institutional Church does not have a mission it IS mission. It embodies and
demonstrates what it is proclaiming. Its
life as an institution is not just the acting out of a mission but the very “BEING” of that mission. Only to the degree that the institution
embodies its divine mission can it be said to be divinely sanctioned.
Again
Niebuhr writes:
Human society in all of its divisions
and aspects does not believe. Its
institutions are based on unbelief, on lack of confidence in the Lord of heaven
and earth. But the Church has conceived
faith in God and moves in the spirit of that trust as the hopeful and obedient
part of society.
The Church as an Institution is a
human creation. It is a human
institution but when it lives in “…faith
in God and moves in the spirit of that trust as the hopeful and obedient part
of society” then it becomes more than a human institution. Only then can it be said of the Church that
it is “in but not of this world.” Only
then can it be said that the human institution has become one with its mission
and in that becoming been transformed.
Only then can it be said that the Church is the “Body of Christ, the Hope
of the world”. When this happens the
Historic Church is truly a divinely inspired institution, human and yet so much
more.
At this time there is much reason to
despair over and about the state of the historic Church. However, this is to take a short sighted view
of the situation. We are in a time of
transition and evolution. There is much
pain over the dying of the old and the birth of a new reality. What will the historic Church look like in
one hundred years? No one knows, all we can have is confidence that it will
exist and that it will be struggling to be its mission to the peoples of the
world.
An institution is simply a body of
people who have joined together because of a common concern, interest, belief
or objective. They create structures to
enable their common focus to be acted on effectively. Niebuhr writes, “But the Church has conceived faith in God and moves in the spirit of
that trust as the hopeful and obedient part of society.” However, it is not an abstract reality called
the Church as an institution that does this.
It is the people who call themselves the Church who “conceive faith in God and move in the spirit of trust as the hopeful
and obedient part of society.”
Throughout history there has always
been “God’s People” and “The People of God”.
Our concern is with The People of God for they are the ones who have “conceived faith in God and move in the
spirit of trust as the hopeful and obedient part of society.” They are the ones who act out a “direct demonstration of love of God and
neighbor;” they give us a “radical
demonstration of faith;” they, dare to perform the “…pioneering and representative action of response to God in Christ…;” and
thus, “…the invisible Church becomes
visible and the deed of Christ is reduplicated.” They do this on behalf of God’s People who
are loved no more or less than The People of God. God will have His people, even if the very
stones of the field have to be called forth.
As the historic Church, you and I are
called to be nothing less than The People of God in our time. When Peter walked on the water to Jesus he took
his eyes off Jesus and saw the tempest around him and losing his courage began
to sink. Jesus, reaching out his hand,
says, “You little faith! What made you lose your nerve like that?” We must be the ones who in the midst of the
tempest “conceive faith in God and move
in the spirit of trust as the hopeful and obedient part of society.” We are the ones in and through which, “…the invisible Church becomes visible and
the deed of Christ is reduplicated.”
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